


He Sold his Soul for Rock and Roll

by RobberBaroness



Category: Sk8er Boi - Avril Lavigne (Song)
Genre: Dark Magic, F/M, Faustian Bargain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-19
Updated: 2015-12-19
Packaged: 2018-05-07 15:38:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5461952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobberBaroness/pseuds/RobberBaroness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone does stupid things in high school.  Some of us perform dark rituals that bind us together with people who were only sort of our friends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He Sold his Soul for Rock and Roll

**Author's Note:**

  * For [innerbrat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/innerbrat/gifts).



When I see the shrine he has to the girl he loved in high school, I’m thinking _Rebecca_.  I’m thinking Edgar Allan Poe.  I’m thinking this pop punk star is actually a serial killer, and he’s going to turn out to have a closet full of the bodies of petite nerd girls in ballet shoes like some kind of emo Bluebeard.

The truth is much worse.

 

***

 

Liam Nova sold his soul to the devil in exchange for all of his music.

Okay, I know that sounds stupid.  First of all, we’re not exactly talking about Robert Johnson at the crossroads at midnight- we’re talking about a scrawny white boy in artfully ripped clothes with unconvincingly bleached hair.  Second of all, I can hear the obvious retort- the devil sure ripped him off!  Ha ha.  Go on, make fun of his music.  I know you listen to it all the time, safely hidden by headphones.

Look, I’m not saying it worked.  I really don’t know.  He thinks it worked, and I guess that’s what matters- and whatever the hell happened that night all those years ago, it scared us all away from keeping in contact when we graduated.  I laughed about it later, a series of stupid pranks played by stupid teenagers, but I’m not laughing now.  And he definitely isn’t.

Is she laughing?  What was her name- Beatrice?  No, that’s just what he calls her in his songs, a literary allusion he must have picked up in college.  Her real name was Beth, I think, which doesn’t flow quite as well in half-angry, half-forlorn ballads.  Where is she now?

I haven’t seen her in person since senior year of high school, and despite Liam’s stalker-shrine, I don’t think he has either.  We were never the best of friends, but we did use to hang out together at lunch and in the library during study hall, along with a few others in our pseudo-clique.  Liam and I defined ourselves with skateboarding, Beth was shy and into theater, and a couple of us were goths or honor students, but we were all bound together by the conviction that we were deeper and smarter than our peers.  Sometimes we’d get together outside of school, and that was where the trouble started.

Looking back on it, I think the three of us were half-consciously parodying ourselves that night, like we were acting out a slasher movie.  We wrote down our wishes on slips of paper, dotted them with blood, and burned them into ashes.  I wish I could say we were drunk or high at the time, but the only things altering our mental states were drama and self-importance.  I wished for love.  Liam wished for artistic brilliance.  Beth wished for wisdom.

I guess she must have gotten it, because she broke up with him the next day.

Well, okay, she didn’t break up because they had never really been dating in the first place.  They danced together at parties and almost kissed a few times, but it never really happened.  I think Liam worried that she was better than him; she had drive and ambition, while he was unapologetically a burnout.  Liam needed her in his life more than she needed him, and the possibility that she might be sharing his company out of pity drove him crazy.

The shortest, easiest explanation of what happened is that he was right.  Beth was more mature than we were, so she retreated to the company of her more serious-minded friends after growing out of our companionship.  I got my shit together well enough to graduate, as did Liam, and we all went our separate ways.  We thought about each other occasionally within the next few years, because that’s how life works- you miss your friends from high school, but keeping in contact is too much trouble, so you just see them in your fond (and embellished) recollections.

I don’t think that’s what happened, though.  I also don’t really think we sold our souls.  I do think we did something that bound us together more than we should have been, and even if we tried to split up, that something was always going to pull us back together.

It’s funny that none of us minded the blood at the time.  Beth at least had an excuse- her feet were always bloody or bruised or blistered from dancing in toe shoes.  The fictional Beatrice in Liam’s songs leaves bloodstained footprints behind her, and fans think it’s a metaphor.  It isn’t.

 

***

When Liam sought me out for the first time in years, I was dimly aware of his success.  I knew he was the lead in a moderately successful band whose angsty songs were a lot better than anyone wanted to admit.  I knew he’d taken the last name Nova and switched from baggy clothes to black-on-black thrift store suits- which looked better on him than I would have imagined.  In fact, he looked pretty good in all his pictures, better than he’d ever shown any promise of looking back in high school.

I was flattered when he sent me the friend request, and intrigued when he offered me a ticket to one of his shows.  That was the first time I heard any of his “Beatrice” songs- this was before the big-budget music videos, after all.  I liked the song, and I liked him too.  I didn’t think I was falling in love, just having a good time.

Our clothes came off pretty much as soon as we were alone together, though.  I’d like to say I never would have slept with him if I’d known about his shrine to Beth, but who am I kidding?  It wouldn’t have made a damn bit of difference.  I wished for love from dark forces when I was young, and now that I had the chance of an actual demon lover I wasn’t backing down.

I was in love.  We were in love.  Haven’t you heard?

He’s just a boy and I’m just a girl.  Except that’s not true, because I don’t really know what he is anymore.  

That thing I called him before, a demon lover?  Does that sound familiar?  He wrote a song by that name, and it’s generally considered both one of his best and his most pretentious.  The way he describes the title character is lurid and grotesque but somehow erotic, a beast whose true nature only shows when he bares his skin and you can see the blackened veins pumping with ichor, keeping him alive to do the bidding of his masters.

The song is true.  The veins, the teeth, the sexual prowess, the life sucked away from the ones he loves to fuel his grand creations.  For such a cute guy, Liam Nova hasn’t had many girlfriends, at least not ones he’s been photographed with.  There’s a reason for that, and a reason he contacted me out of the blue.

I don’t know how he knew this, but he did- my wish made me immune.  I asked for a lover, and I got one.  Lucky me.

 

***

The demon lover and his mate; there’s going to be a song about her on the next album.  That just leaves “Beatrice” as a character with a story to be concluded.  It’s not that he’s in love with her anymore; he says he isn’t, and I believe him.  Poor Liam isn’t a very subtle guy, and if he were trying to pull one over on his girlfriend, I think I’d be able to tell.

The shrine to Beth shows pictures of her from our yearbook, along with illustrations of all the themes that pop up in the Beatrice songs.  Bloody footprints, paper burned to ashes, a maiden who ascended to heaven with a sword in hand.  Beneath the pangs of lost love there’s an actual story being told, about a woman who is destined to destroy those who love her because she is better than they are.

He was right about me.  Why not about her?  Who am I to say Beth hasn’t grown up to become some kind of- I don’t know, monster hunter or holy warrior or whatever the hell he’s afraid of?  Who am I to say the three of us aren’t bound by fate, or that she didn’t pull away from us at school because she gained the wisdom she had wished for and knew that Liam would have to be destroyed?

My god, it sounds even stupider when I say it aloud than it did in my head.

I wish my story had an ending, but it doesn’t yet, and that’s at least partly because he’s still working on his next album.  Maybe his final album.  There’s going to be another Beatrice song, but the two of us are still trying to work out what kind of song it should be.  It has to reach her and send a message, but what message?  Are we going to warn her to stay away, or beg her to leave us in peace, or challenge her to strike now?

We’ve written three different drafts to go with the same tune, and none of them feel right.

Alice Cooper (I think it was Alice Cooper, anyway) once said that rock stars shouldn’t be trusted or looked to as advice givers because they’re stupid and do lots of drugs.  Fair enough.  If this all turns out to be paranoid ranting induced by chemicals, I’ll look back on our fear and desperation in years to come and laugh.  I still won’t be able to explain what Liam is, but so what?  Bowie doesn’t seem all that human either, and we’ve all collectively decided we’re okay with that.

These are the things I think about when I lie in bed with my arms wrapped around the man I love, feeling the rise and fall of his chest and his skin that burns to the touch no matter the state of his health.  What if she comes to find us before we finish the song?  He’s been on tv; she knows he’s around.  If I see her at a concert, what should I do, send her away or bring her backstage for a confrontation?  I don’t want to lose Liam and I don’t want to hurt Beth and most of all I don’t want to be the only one remaining if they do destroy each other, like in the songs.

I wished for love, and while I still have it, I will hold my demon lover tight and wish away the angel who haunts him. Maybe this is how the story ends.


End file.
